


i didn't open your eyes but i heard you speak

by transtwinyards



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Gen, Multi, Trans Male Character, hints of a breakup, hints of polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 16:52:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11855754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transtwinyards/pseuds/transtwinyards
Summary: Aaron drops by his brother's apartment to wait for Kevin to pick him up. Cats, conversations, and complications ensue.





	i didn't open your eyes but i heard you speak

**Author's Note:**

> this au belongs to my good friend [kat](http://aaronminyardwillfightyou.tumblr.com). thanks for letting me borrow your au for this!!!
> 
> kudos to [clare](http://frxnkenstein.tumblr.com) for proofreading this.
> 
> the title is from nieves' empty book. check it out!!
> 
> here's my piece for the[@aaronminyarddefencenet](http://aaronminyarddefencenet.tumblr.com)'s third and fourth week for the first creation event!! the list of hc's and the ships & au are in the end notes!!

Without looking, he crossed the street. The heat was unbearable, his legs sweaty enough that he could feel the drops running down his legs. His chest ached with every breath he took but it was easy enough to disregard, and it should be for another fifteen minutes. He convinced himself that the aches in his arm were from being sore with lifting his bag, not at all that he was out of shape.

A year off the varsity team really did a number on him. For fuck’s sake, his eyesight went from _I can probably take a few more concussions_ to _what the hell am I looking at_.

Whether it was the caffeine or the suddenness of each vibration, his phone buzzed for the nth time since he took off the airplane mode for the trip and startled him. With a frustrated sigh, he wrenched it out of his back pocket and put it as close to his face as he could see. The glare of the sunlight wasn’t any help.

 _Call me when you get there. Kaye will be here an hour._  
_This is kaye. thea says hi :*_  
 _Did you land yet?_  
 _Is kevin there???_  
 _Aaron Michael answer me pl_ s

Aaron hadn’t pegged Theadora Muldani as the anxious type but anyone who managed Kevin and the Ravens came out with problems and he wasn’t going to rule out number fourteen.

With a sigh, Aaron pressed call and brought the phone to his shoulder, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. A glance from the mirror of one of the closed down parlors on the strip showed him how pink he’d gotten with the heat.

God, Florida was the worst.

“I should’ve gotten a cab,” Aaron said when the call finally connected.

“ _Hello to you too,_ ” came Thea’s sour tone. “ _Can’t handle the Miami heat?_ ”

He pressed forward with his trek, only a little disturbed that the streets were empty. It was before noon on a Thursday. Every street was empty until rush hour. Taking a few quick breaths, he replied, “Hey, fuck you, lady, I’m pale as fuck and I’m not built for this.”

“ _I want to let you know that Katelyn is very disappointed you didn’t catch that obvious basketball reference. Also, since you’re walking, I’m assuming Kevin didn’t pick you up at the stop_?”

“You tell me. Your husband’s gravitational balance belongs to every court in the country.” There was one around two blocks away. Aaron knew by rote, of course. He’d been to Miami only twice before, but he wasn’t that bad with his memory.

There was shuffling in the other line, then Katelyn’s voice came through, muffled and distant. “ _Is he there yet?_ ”

“ _No. Kev is either at the court or at the nearest Exites like usual,_ ” Thea answered, away from the receiver. To Aaron, she said, “ _Hey, you can get there, right?_ ”

There was a twinge of concern there, the little that Aaron allowed her. The heat was unbearable, of course, but with the black binder underneath the thin shirt, anything was unbearable at mid-noon. He could stand to lose the binder but he had to get there first.

“I’m slightly dehydrated,” Aaron said, a little winded. “And my breathing’s a little on the painful side. But I’m almost to their apartment.” Why the hell did these fuckers even live in an apartment building up a hill?

He squinted down the street when he reached the top, spotting the black Maserati from the sea of white SUVs and red sports cars.

Right. They had a car. How could he forget.

“I’m here,” he told Thea once he crossed the last intersection separating him from air-conditioning. “I’ll call you guys later. Preferably when Kevin’s here.”

“ _It’s a plan_.”

Aaron smiled, “Yeah, it’s a plan. Bye. Say hi to my pets for me.”

Almost immediately, he heard Katelyn shout back, “ _We share custody of Popo, asshole_.”

“ _Will do_.”

Upon hanging up, Aaron almost sighed in relief when he got to the shade at the front. Something dropped on his head. Something small. He reached up with his wrist and brushed it off and saw a cigarette butt drop from his head.

“Fucking immature,” he muttered, kicking it away.

Summers weren’t really reserved for training in Palmetto State, but it became tradition with Kevin on their backs. He’d heard from Thea and Nicky that Josten wasn’t doing his masters so he wasn’t doing whatever the hell entailed in a Math degree. By estimate, Josten should have been back at campus as he’d always been, training with Robin or whatever, but the season was off.

Just his luck, Aaron half-expected him to be here with his other half.

(Weird bastard. What kind of sick person got a Math degree? Even as a BioChem undergrad, Aaron loathed having to do any kind of mathematics. Boyd—well, _Boyd-Wilds_ usually teased him for it.

Made sense that asshole made friends with this one.)

He buzzed in, and it took a while for either of them to answer. He could imagine them. Either Neil or Andrew, stepping around the same number of animals around their apartment, bumping corners to get to the buzzer.

“ _Who goes there._ ” This was, of course, Neil.

Fucking Christ. Aaron hated being right almost as much as he hated when everyone was right.

“I don’t know, asshole, who do you think you threw a cigarette at?”

“ _I did no such thing. Andrew, did I throw a cigarette out the window at a passerby? I don’t think so_.”

“Just let me up, Josten. I’m dying out here.”

“ _I don’t have a Hippocratic Oa—ow! Okay, okay. Jesus._ ”

A buzzer rang. The door unlocked and, once opened, blasted cold air at Aaron’s face. It was quite the oasis from the heat.

Thankfully, the assholes lived on the second floor. Aaron thought maybe it was to account for Andrew’s fear of heights, or maybe Neil’s need to be able to jump out of a window at any given moment. Either way, it was convenient for him.

He still took the elevator though. Fuck that hill. Fuck this heat. And fuck the guy he sat next to on the bus for drooling a line down his shoulder because it smelled every time his arm crossed his face. No way he was gonna use the stairs after that.

The first thing said to him once the door opened was, “Shut the door before they run out.”

And the first thing he said to that was, “What?”

Meowing. Incessant meowing and mewling and all other sounds involving kittens came next. All of them, the hairless little bastards started crawling up his jeans like he was the goddamn Empire State Building in King-Kong.

Hey, he had to admit. He liked to feel tall.

His brother was dressed in sweatpants and his usual binder, watching the kittens climbing Aaron as he stood by the kitchen. Neil was fast to crouch down to Aaron’s feet—he could _definitely_ get used to this—and plucking all the kittens away from Aaron’s pants.

He missed one. This one managed to get to Aaron’s shirt, so Aaron reached down to grab it by the scruff of its neck and held it up to his face. Heterochromia with blue and brown. This little kitty was a fortune to cat enthusiasts and an interesting experiment for a veterinary undergrad.

Aaron was getting his PhD on Neurology.

“Which wrinkly cat impregnated which?” He asked. This question, of course, was directed to Andrew.

It was met with no answer which, of course, was expected of Andrew.

“If I were you, I’d put that one down,” Neil replied in kind. Or, whatever counted as kind to someone like him. “Won’t do you good if one of its parents see you cat-handling its kits.”

“It’s ‘kittens’,” Aaron corrected.

“That’s not a verb,” Andrew pointed out.

Neil huffed. “’Til I see either of you trying to maintain this chaos, I’m not hearing anything.”

Aaron rolled his eyes, then put his bag down and, in the process, the kitten he was cat-handling. “Don’t act all smart and mature like you didn’t throw a cigarette butt at my head just five minutes ago.”

Neil turned around after grabbing the last kitten and ignored this. Petty asshole.

Aaron shoved his shoes off and made his way into the apartment. It was the same as it was the last time he’d been here. With Kevin, Nicky, and Matt, two years ago when they collectively helped Andrew with the move. Then, again, last year when he had to pick Kevin up after a bad _relapse_ —Abby’s word, not his—on Riko’s death anniversary.

It was all the same pictures on the bulletin board in the hallway, same letter magnets on the fridge that spelled _FCK YOU._ He was sure that if he popped in to the living room now, he’d see the same clawed up couch and the same flat screen TV on the floor.

It wasn’t a bad apartment, considering it wasn’t really one Andrew lived _in_. With Andrew playing for pros and Neil still in college, the cats usually lived in with Betsy and the apartment remained empty for the better part of the year.

The apartment looked pretty lived in right now, considering Neil and the cats were in and the season was off.

Andrew stood by the kitchen, looming and quiet, as he was. He hadn’t moved in the past few minutes, which wasn’t unusual behavior of him. Blink and you’d think he was part of the room. The look he gave Aaron was enough of a question. _How was your trip?_

Betsy the Shrink told him once that Andrew never really asked questions he wanted answers to, that he was better off figuring it out indirectly. Aaron had learned to adjust. He said, “My trip was drawn out and incredibly annoying. The walk here was hot.”

“There was a heat spike in the news last night,” Neil shouted from the living room. “Should’ve checked first before you got out at the bus stop. You could’ve bought yourself an umbrella to save you from all those stray cigarette butts aimed at your head.”

“I’ll aim a butt at _your_ head,” Aaron muttered as he turned to the kitchen for a drink. The bottle inside the fridge felt good against the nape of his neck, and it felt just as good as the water slid down his throat. He looked at Andrew, with a glass half-full and a throat half-parched, and found his brother looking back. He sighed and winced, the discomfort on his ribs making itself known.

He asked, “You mind if I take my binder off in _su casa_?”

Andrew shrugged.

The bathroom was the same as it always was. Aaron never really stuck around in there long enough to tell if they made any new developments. Once you almost walk in on your brother having sex, you never want to be in all the other places he could’ve done it.

Which was why Aaron never hung out much here.

With the binder off, he took a few deep breaths, checked himself on the mirror. It had him a bit irked, as he usually was when he remembers there was someone else who was his height and face, that the mirror was just his height. That he didn’t have to struggle with the sink. It was too familiar in an unfamiliar place.

He frowned, rubbing under his tits with his shirt, wiping away at the sweat.

“When did Kevin say he’d get here?” He heard Neil ask once he got out of the bathroom. Neil turned the corner, gray shirt riddled with inscrutable rips.

Aaron folded his damp binder in his hands, checking his wristwatch. _12:05 PM_. “He said he’d be here by twelve.”

“Probably did an extra round, got caught in traffic,” Andrew said derisively from the kitchen, the first few words he’d said to Aaron directly. Well, kinda.

Aaron hummed. “Probably.”

Something pricked his shin. He twisted around to see the same wrinkly little naked bastard climbing up his pant leg again.

“I think that one likes you,” Andrew pointed out.

Neil turned to look then frowned as Aaron bent to pick the kitten up by its scruff again, then put it on his shoulder.

“I could have sworn I got them all in the pen,” Neil muttered.

“Don’t like escapees, escapee?” Aaron teased. The kitten butted its head against his cheek, then mewed softly at his ear.

There was a quirk to Andrew’s lips when he pointed at Neil, causing Neil to roll his eyes.

Aaron felt the kitten press against his cheek, watching this interaction between brother and ex-teammate with interest. In the last few times he’d seen this couple together in public and around mutual company, they were never apart for more than a few moments. In the past ten minutes, they didn’t even seem to look at each other, not counting that teasing look.

Was there trouble in paradise? Were they out of the honeymoon phase? Did they even _have_ a honeymoon phase? Aaron didn’t think he wanted to know.

A knock sounded out from the front door, snapping him out of his reverie. He took three quick steps and opened it himself.

Kevin looked as well as Aaron had last seen him on TV just this morning. Press release really buttered him up as well as they could improve. Kevin’s usual downfall was his actual personality, but there was no masking that. They made up for it with sleek haircuts and designer clothes, because if you’ve got skin as golden as Kevin Day’s, you don’t need that shit.

The rest was all fake.

“Hey,” Kevin greeted, a soft smile in place. Directed at Aaron, this was, of course, genuine. “Ran into a few fans on the way over. You ready to go?”

“You mean you met around two dozen of them and there was a high-speed chase involved,” Andrew said from the kitchen counter. He didn’t seem keen on moving from there for as long as there were guests in his apartments.

Kevin rolled his eyes, then looked around Aaron. “Where’re your bags? I didn’t park, my car’s idle out there.”

Aaron stepped aside and gestured to where he’d left it with his shoes by the entrance. Small claws scratched at his shoulder as the kitten was jostled in the movement. Kevin took a step and leaned down to grab Aaron’s bag, his side brushing against Aaron’s front, not a sweat or grunt of effort coming from him when he lifted it over his shoulder.

Aaron could still feel the twinge in his arm from carrying it the thirty-minute walk to Andrew and Neil’s apartment.

“Careful with that one,” Neil said from the living room. “He’s a worse driver than Nicky.”

“Who says he’s gonna be the one driving? Death by vehicular manslaughter isn’t on my itinerary today,” Aaron deadpanned. Kevin brushed his elbow against Aaron’s arm in retaliation. Aaron resisted the smile on his face.

Kevin huffed, “I’m gonna wait in the car. I don’t want to be here to hear you talk shit.”

“You never are,” Neil called out. The smile on his face was audible in his voice.

Kevin rolled his eyes.

Aaron moved to fish his phone out of his right pocket, but paused when claws dug into his shoulder again. With what was probably a desperate look on his face, Aaron said, “Can you get my phone? It’s in my back pocket.”

Kevin grabbed it without hesitation, confused.

“Call Katelyn. Thea’s probably still with her. They said to call when you got here.”

Kevin nodded.

Aaron turned around to kick at his shoes. Once he’d shoved his feet into them, he looked back to an empty doorway. Kevin was already by the stairwell. Aaron watched him go from the door, cursing his long-ass legs for taking him to places faster than most of the men in the apartment.

Aaron brought his hands to his shoulder, palms open and moving slowly. Gingerly grabbing the kitten on the scruff of its neck, he shut the door behind him. He made his way to the kitchen, past Andrew, and laid the kitten down on the counter.

Andrew watched him with mild boredom.

“I need to go,” Aaron said, downing what was left of his glass of water. Then, with some hesitation, the rest of the bottle. With a gasp, Aaron added, “Thanks for letting me in.”

“You just told Kevin Day to call your wife,” Andrew pointed out.

“Yeah, and?”

“And you said it right after you made him pick your phone out of your back pocket. To add to that, you don’t have your binder on.”

Aaron knew what he was seeing: the proximity between Aaron and Kevin earlier, the smiles and jabs at each other, and the fact that Thea and Katelyn were mentioned too. Andrew was seeing the beginnings of something so new, it could barely even open its eyes yet.

But it was there and it existed and Andrew could see it.

“You haven’t touched or whispered anything to Josten in the past ten minutes,” Aaron pointed out in return.

“Yeah, and?”

Aaron smirked. “Need I say more? You two could barely be out of each others’ sight in college, much less out of arm’s reach.”

Their eyes locked, a wave passed between one Minyard twin to the other. Understanding, acceptance, curiosity.

Andrew never asked questions he wanted answers to because they were a drag. It was easier to have someone defend themselves after being presented with an unexplainable truth because it was less effort.

Aaron just wanted to be told willingly. Just for once, if they could go back to the relationship they had before Tilda, when Andrew presented facts about himself in exchange for Aaron’s time.

The truth between them was this: they wanted to know about each other.

The truth to them was this: neither of them knew how to ask.

Without lingering, the moment passed.

Andrew said, “Keep the kitten.”

“What?”

“We have seven too many.”

“You have seven cats.”

“Exactly.”

“Joseph.”

“Michael.”

Both men stood there, solid in their stance until a solitary meow broke through their posturing. The kitten had climbed up Aaron’s shirt, again, and settled back on his now-scratched and pockmarked shirt sleeve.

Andrew wasn’t deciding for Aaron. He was voicing what the kitten wanted.

It was ridiculous.

Guess he had a kitten now.

“I’m leaving,” Aaron said as he picked the kitten up and pooled it in both hands this time, like how a person should probably hand a kitten. He made his way down the hall, struggling with his shoes as he walked.

“Don’t die!” Neil called out from the living room.

“Call me,” Andrew said.

Aaron paused, then nodded.

**Author's Note:**

> hc's in this fic:  
> -aaron is trans  
> -aaron has glasses and shitty eyesight  
> -aaron doesn't like popo but loves his pet fishies  
> -aaron gets a kitten from andrew and neil's cats' new litter (he names it squishie; there's a trend to that and that's because)  
> -aaron loves finding nemo
> 
> ships in this fic:  
> -kevthea + kaaron
> 
> au: kat explains it better but basically, it's an au where andrew and neil mutually break up and continue life as house/apartment-mates who share custody on fifty percent of their property due to their sense of debt. they still love and trust each other more than most and would probably kill for the other but they don't kiss or have sex anymore. hugs and touches are debatable. oh, and, kevin visits a lot and aaron and andrew settle their differences by becoming pet parents.


End file.
